Basically the idea is a space trade/shooter on a vast scale. Travel will be sub-light inertial within solar-systems with jump gates between systems.I am looking for some feedback on the unique control system which is really the hook of the game. Basically the ship has two control modes: while holding down Shift the ship is in standard asteroid style (i.e keep drifting until you act to stop it) mode. Releasing Shift activates a computer control system that attempts to make the ship fly in a more user friendly manner (within the same physics simulation).

if you want some criticism, i did think i was moving a bit slow. would be nice if the "auto pilot" was needed. in order to prevent hitting objects. but i seemed to be moving so slow that it wasnt needed.

Space games tend to have the problem that you don't feel like you are really moving. The max speed is pretty fast and quick enough that it would be impossible to dodge anything as it appears on screen. I think what I need to do is add a debris layer at that is the same paralax level as the ship so you get a sense for how fast you are going.

2 straight horizontal lines appear on the screen, one above the ship, one below, I don't know why. It does not come from my computer as I have already played with tens of Java games using JOGL, GL4J and LWJGL.

Markus_Persson - You are of course correct, but I think it is actually a timing issue with my update loop which is dependant on the framerate (an hence vsync). Very high frame rates result in very small increments in in position so vsync may fix the issue (most of the time) but the more I think about it the more I realize it is most certainly the wrong way to fix it.

ChrisM - I don't suppose you could elaborate? I haven't tested on OSX so there is a good chance it won't work but I have included the native libs so it should in theory.

I can't believe Apple haven't got 1.6 sorted properly on OS X yet. There is nothing that is dependent on 1.6, I just put 1.6+ in the jnlp because I have had Java version problems before. For the next release (this weekend hopefully) I'll try going back to 1.5.

I think it is actually a timing issue with my update loop which is dependant on the framerate (an hence vsync). Very high frame rates result in very small increments in in position so vsync may fix the issue (most of the time)

The control scheme concept is cool but it didn't feel quite much like you explained sws26. Maybe if you added some foreground asteroids it would be more obvious? By the way, the graphics are really, really nice!

I can't believe Apple haven't got 1.6 sorted properly on OS X yet. There is nothing that is dependent on 1.6, I just put 1.6+ in the jnlp because I have had Java version problems before. For the next release (this weekend hopefully) I'll try going back to 1.5.

-Added a radar so you don't get lost-Something to shoot (ctrl)-Something to shoot at (no collisions yet)-Made a rough model of our solar system out to Jupiter (need to work on rings for Saturn)-Added debris layer so you can tell how fast you are going-Upped the top speed-Tried out a nice blue nebula-Switched to requiring 1.5+ (not tested)

Yes I am an Kiwi, live in Christchurch at the moment but moving to the US (California) in a few months.Collision detection using a quad tree may be problematic because the levels are completely unbounded and so I would end up with a really deep sparse tree. Frankly I've never had any performance problems just doing a nested loop through every object in the world and doing a distance squared check but if it becomes a bottleneck I suppose I could go for a quad tree.

Yes I am an Kiwi, live in Christchurch at the moment but moving to the US (California) in a few months.Collision detection using a quad tree may be problematic because the levels are completely unbounded and so I would end up with a really deep sparse tree. Frankly I've never had any performance problems just doing a nested loop through every object in the world and doing a distance squared check but if it becomes a bottleneck I suppose I could go for a quad tree.

Yeah im trying for an epic scale of objects in the universe. Just make sure the tree isnt so deep just to avoid the O(n^2) stuff. Anyway good luck!